Hero’s Journey

Working Notes: The Quest for the Self

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person stepping on tree trunk while holding a sword

I’ve started reading Ruth Netzer’s Tarot of Self Discovery. I’m only in the introduction, but already I can feel one of those useful recognitions happening. She is writing about tarot in a way that sits very close to my own use of the cards: not as fortune-telling or mystical commandments, but as a form of Jungian active imagination.

The cards become images that help the psyche speak.

Netzer seems to work with two principles at once. One is psychological: the image reflects something going on inside us. The other is synchronistic: the image that appears at a particular moment may carry a strange rightness, as if the unconscious, the world, and the timing of the draw are briefly conspiring to make something visible.

That is the space where tarot becomes interesting to me. Not prediction or obedience. And definitely not “the cards say.” More like, ‘Here is a symbolic mirror.’ What does it constellate? What does it disturb? What does it reveal that ordinary language has not quite managed to reach?

Netzer is also working with the Hero’s Journey, which makes sense. Tarot almost invites that reading. The Major Arcana can easily be seen as a sequence of initiations: departure, trial, descent, death, renewal, and return. But she has also mentioned, more than once now, something she calls the Quest for the Self, placing it alongside the Hero’s Journey and the Heroine’s Journey.

That phrase caught me.

The Quest for the Self.

It feels related to the heroic pattern but not identical to it. The hero goes out. The Self seems to call us inward and downward, then wider.

Hero, heroine, Self

A working distinction might be this.

The Hero’s Journey is the ego going out into the world to be tested. It leaves the ordinary world, faces trials, meets helpers and enemies, wins or receives the boon, and returns changed. Its centre of gravity is ordeal, action, courage, separation, initiation, and return.

The Heroine’s Journey, especially in Maureen Murdock’s sense, often concerns the healing of a split. The feminine is rejected or devalued, the masculine-coded world of achievement is pursued, and then some kind of aridity, wound, or descent forces a return to the body, the mother, feeling, relation, and inner belonging. Its centre of gravity is reconnection.

The Quest for the Self feels wider and stranger than both.

It is not mainly about defeating the dragon. It is not only about healing the split. It is about entering relationship with the total psyche. The ego meets what it has excluded, projected, feared, desired, idealised, and misunderstood. The journey is not towards a prize but towards a more complete relation with the deep pattern of the person.

In Jung’s language, this is individuation: the long, symbolic process by which the ego comes into relationship with the Self.

And the Self is not the same as the personal self, the personality, the social identity, or the story I like to tell about who I am. The Self is the organising centre and circumference of the psyche. It includes consciousness and unconsciousness, light and shadow, masculine and feminine, personal history and archetypal depth.

The Self is not the hero.

The Self is the wider field in which the hero appears.

The shape of the quest

The Hero’s Journey is often drawn as a circle: departure, initiation, return.

The Quest for the Self feels more like a spiral, a mandala, or a labyrinth. You keep circling the centre, but each circuit reveals another layer. You do not simply arrive at the Self as if it were a castle at the end of the map. You are slowly reorganised by your relationship to it.

The first movement is often a call from within. Something in the old ego-story begins to fail. The life may still work on the surface, but underneath it there is a knock at the door. Dreams sharpen. Synchronicities appear. Old symbols return. A card keeps showing up. A book arrives at the right moment. A sentence starts glowing.

The psyche seems to say: the map you are using is too small.

Then comes the encounter with the persona: the mask, the social role, the public operating system. Who have I learned to be? What do I perform? Which parts of me are rewarded? Which parts have been exiled so the approved self can keep functioning?

This is where tarot becomes useful as active imagination. A card can reveal a role, a script, a borrowed authority, a desire-system, a stuck pattern. The question is not, “Which card am I?” The better question may be, “Which part of me is speaking through this image?”

After that, inevitably, comes the shadow.

The shadow is not simply the bad self. It is everything the ego has not been able, willing, or permitted to identify with. Rage, envy, need, grief, vanity, power, tenderness, brilliance, sensuality, weakness, wildness, dependency, genius. All the material pushed outside the conscious self-image.

This is where the Quest for the Self differs from the heroic reflex. The heroic ego wants to defeat the monster. The deeper work asks for a conversation.

The question changes from:

How do I defeat this?

To:

What part of my unlived life is wearing this frightening face?

That is shadow gold territory.

The inner figures

In Jungian terms, the psyche is full of figures: shadow, anima, animus, child, trickster, great mother, wise old man, wounded healer, king, queen, psychopomp, divine animal.

Tarot gives these figures a theatre.

The Fool, the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress, the Emperor, the Hierophant, the Lovers, the Hermit, Death, Temperance, the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, the Sun, Judgement, the World. Each card is a chamber. Each image offers a way for the unconscious to become visible without being reduced too quickly to a concept.

That may be why tarot continues to matter. The image does not explain itself away. It waits. It lets the psyche project, react, resist, recognise, and revise.

Used this way, the card is not an oracle issuing orders. It is a doorway.

The psychological principle says: the image reflects inner dynamics.

The synchronistic principle says: this image, now, in this moment, may be oddly exact.

Together they create a charged mirror.

Holding the opposites

At some point, the Quest for the Self becomes less about discovering “who I really am” and more about becoming able to hold contradiction without collapsing it too quickly.

I am monk and frontman.

I am wounded and gifted.

I want solitude and recognition.

I want freedom and belonging.

I am rational and mythic.

I am ordinary and archetypal.

The ego prefers clean identity. The Self seems to prefer wholeness.

Wholeness is untidy. It includes the opposites. A real symbol can hold what logic alone wants to split apart. That is part of the power of tarot, dream images, mythic motifs, and synchronistic events. They can carry contradiction without killing it.

The Self does not always say: choose one side.

Sometimes it says: become large enough to hold the tension until a third thing appears.

Grounding the Self

There is a danger here, of course. Whenever we start speaking about the Self, archetypes, symbols, synchronicity, and the deep pattern of a life, inflation is nearby. The ego can try to claim the whole thing for itself. It can turn the Self into a costume, a spiritual achievement, or a private mythology of specialness.

That is why the work has to remain grounded.

Make coffee. Take a walk. Pay the bill. Write the paragraph. Talk kindly to the person in front of you.

The Self is not an excuse to float away from ordinary life. It asks to be embodied there.

The Quest for the Self does not end with escape from the world. It returns us to the world with a different centre of gravity. We still have a personality, wounds, preferences, irritations, bills, unfinished drafts, and awkward emails. But perhaps we are a little less possessed by one-sided identity. Less ruled by projections. Less desperate to be pure, impressive, innocent, correct, or complete.

The question becomes ethical in the deepest sense:

If this is in me, how shall I live with it consciously?

That may be the real boon.

A working note for now

So for now, my working model is this:

The Hero’s Journey is achievement through ordeal.

The Heroine’s Journey is healing through descent and reconnection.

The Quest for the Self is wholeness through symbolic integration.

Or, put another way:

The Quest for the Self is the Hero’s Journey turned inward, then widened until the hero discovers he was never the whole story.

The hero wants to complete the quest.

The Self wants to complete the person.

And tarot, used well, becomes a cabinet of living images through which the psyche can say:

Look again. There is more of you here than you thought.

You Can Understand Everything and Still Not Know What to Do

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How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you something. This question isn’t optional. It’s baked into what it means to be human.

I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on my walk into town this afternoon, heading to Tesco to pick up a few things. I listened to chapter one, Maps of Experience. Already, it feels like one of those books you don’t just read. You go into it.

His opening move is deceptively simple. We don’t experience the world as a bunch of objects. We experience it as a field of meaning.

A chair isn’t just a physical thing with weight and structure. It’s something to sit on. Something in the way. Something that belongs to someone. Something that defines a corner of a room. The meaning shows up first. The “object” comes later, when we deliberately shift into analysis.

That sounds obvious until you follow it all the way through.

If meaning comes first, if the world we actually live in is a world of significance rather than just things, then how we make meaning isn’t some optional add-on. It’s the central question. And the tools we’ve built for that, myth, religion, story, and ritual, are not primitive versions of science waiting to be replaced. They answer a different kind of question. One science doesn’t even try to answer.

Peterson is making an epistemological point, not a theological one. Science asks how things work. Myth asks how you should act in relation to them. Those are different categories.

You can understand the neurochemistry of grief and still have no idea how to grieve. You can explain the evolutionary function of courage and still not know how to be brave. A map of mechanism isn’t a map of meaning.

What mythology carries, across cultures and millennia, is behavioural wisdom. Not the kind you can fully capture in neat propositions. The hero who descends into the underworld, faces the monster, and comes back changed is as precise a description as we have of how real change works. You go into the unknown. You face what’s there. If you make it back, you bring something with you that matters, not just for you but also for others.

The hero’s journey isn’t just a story template. It’s a map of territory every one of us has to cross at some point.

I’ve spent over twenty years working at the level of story, with people trying to rewrite the scripts running their lives, often without realising those scripts are there. What I keep seeing is this. Transformation doesn’t happen in the rational mind.

You can understand a story is false. You can trace where it came from, see what it’s costing you, and even describe a better version. And still stay stuck. Understanding sits on the surface. The story runs deeper.

Peterson is giving me the theoretical scaffolding for what I’ve been seeing in practice. Myth is where the code runs. Reason mostly skims across the top. Which is why you can’t just think your way into a different life. You have to work at the level of story.

This is where Friedrich Nietzsche comes in. He saw, maybe more clearly than anyone, what was at stake when the West started dismantling its mythic foundations in the name of reason.

“The death of God” is a cultural diagnosis. The framework that held meaning together for centuries was losing its grip. The stories were no longer landing in the way they needed to.

They still existed. The language was still there. The symbols were still in circulation. But something in the relationship between people and those stories had shifted. They were no longer inhabited in the same way. What had once organised perception, behaviour, and value from the inside began to feel external, optional, even arbitrary.

The structure remained in place, but the felt reality that gave it force had thinned. And once that happens, a framework can persist for a long time in form while quietly losing its ability to orient action.

The framework doesn’t disappear just because you’ve stopped believing in it.

Peterson touches on this almost in passing, but it deserves more attention. The idea that human beings have inherent worth. That truth matters, not just strategically but morally. That history has direction, that actions accumulate, that things tend somewhere. These are not scientific facts. They are inheritances. Mythic ones.

The code is still running, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Nietzsche saw the consequence. You can’t keep the fruit while cutting the root. Eventually the structure underneath inherited morality collapses. What fills that gap is not reason. Reason is good at taking things apart. It is not good at building something to live inside.

What tends to rush in is ideology, a partial map pretending to be the whole territory. The twentieth century gave us more than enough evidence of that.

This is what Peterson is pointing at when he contrasts the hero with the ideologue. The hero goes into the unknown willing to be changed. The ideologue goes in with conclusions already fixed and forces everything to fit them. One updates the map. The other defends it.

I’ve been orbiting these ideas for a long time, from different directions. Carl Jung and archetypes. NLP and deep structure. Chaos magick and the idea that belief is something you use, not something you have to commit to permanently.

Underneath it all, the same question keeps returning. Why do these ancient stories still hit? Even now. Even for people who have rejected the systems that produced them. Why does the hero going into the dark still land in the chest like recognition?

Peterson’s answer is clean. Those stories describe the structure of experience itself. The known and the unknown. Order and chaos. Mapped territory and the edges where the map runs out.

Every life moves through that terrain.

Myths are the compressed record of how to do it. They were carried forward because they worked. Because the people who knew how to move through that landscape made it through. The others did not.

Story is not just how we communicate meaning. It is how we hold it.

Peterson has spent thirty years mapping this from inside the library. I’ve spent twenty-odd years mapping it from inside the room. Different routes, similar conclusions. That kind of convergence is always interesting.

So I’m going in.

I don’t know yet where it will lead. The best thinking rarely ends up where you expect. I’ll write as I go. Follow the thread rather than pretend I already know the destination.

If this is your kind of terrain, the questions that don’t sit still, the place where mythology and the problem of how to live turn out to be the same thing, come along.

It’s with light heart I go

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I woke up to the news that Tom Petty had died.  Sad days indeed.  I immediately played on of my favourite Tom Petty track:

I remember when this video first came out I was ecstatic.  It was during those days that I played a lot of role-playing games one of which was Gamma World, a science fantasy role-playing game set in a 24th century post-apocalyptic earth. This video was like Gamma World brought to life and set to music.  I raced to the television every time this video came on MTV.

Another one of my all time favourite Tom Petty tracks is You Don’t Know How It Feels off of his 1994 album, Wildflowers.

I could go on and on…

A vision came to me this morning of two paths.  One path was labelled ‘existential angst’ the other, ‘the devil may care.’  I could see myself standing at this divergence.  I’ve been down both paths at one time or another in my life, so the choice didn’t disturb me.  Quite frankly, I’ve been on the chilled path for too long, grown too comfortable, so this choice comes at just the right time.

Rainer Rilke said the “Only journey is the one within.”  That may be so, but I’m tired of that journey.  I’ve been inside and there’s nothing there but a big dark void.  One I’ve tried to fill with many things, but each time the object of my desire was devoured by the void.

So it’s with light heart that I begin to tread down the ‘devil may care’ road.  I’m not sure what that will entail, but I look forward to finding out.

I wanted to say something about this whole inner journey thing.  In Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Once the hero has completed the quest and the elixir, he or she has to face one more trial – The Return.  The road back is often dangerous and many heroes don’t make it back. Not always because they meet some demise, but because they have fallen in love with the enchanted world and refuse to return back to the Ordinary World where the hero belongs.  By choosing to stay, the hero abandons the Ordinary world and doesn’t bring back the elixir that will help humanity.

I think that happens with a lot of seekers.  They embark on the inner journey.  They learn to meditate. They adopt some form of spiritual practice that unburdens their soul. They find peace. The bliss is intoxicating. They get trapped in non-ordinary reality, seduced by the bliss. They fail to heed the Zen Master’s warning:

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

I think I’ll hang out here for a while:

On that note, as you can see, my glass is empty.  Gotta top up.

This is what I’m drinking tonight:

Soundtrack: